“A Clever Narcissist”: Uncovering the Dark Side of John DeLorean | Documentary

Designed as a feature film for the BBC, now fleshed out and split into three parts for streaming on Netflix, the biographical documentary takes stock of a man bogged down in ambiguity. (Those stunned with nostalgia for Back to the Future, look elsewhere – a brief mandatory name check at the top of the first episode fixes the problem with bigger fish to fry.) When he left a comfortable position at General Motors to invent the car of the future, was he a free thinker pursuing a noble dream, or a delusional narcissist obsessed with getting his name on a company? When he brought the fledgling DeLorean Motor Company (DMC) to the Dunmurry neighborhood, was he expressing solidarity with a controversial cause or was he simply capitalizing on a period of turbulent political instability? When he agreed to carry millions of dollars worth of cocaine for what turned out to be undercover agents, was he turning out to be a con artist or was he the victim of an unfair set-up on the verge of entrapment?

These were the main questions tackled by pioneering non-fiction filmmaker Chris Hegedus and his late partner, DA Pennebaker, when they set out to direct their own DeLorean film at the height of its controversy in the 1970s and 1980s. . Myth and Mogul reuses never-before-seen footage from this project, as well as segments of heartfelt interviews with Hegedus in his front row seat in the eerie spectacle of DeLorean’s life. “As we started to unwrap DeLorean, particularly his childhood and early years until his deviousness in college, we started to see that his character traits had been a part of his personality for a long time,” Jon-Barrie Waddell, executive producer, told The Guardian. “By dissecting them in more detail, we saw that there was another side to the type of business leader he had been described. He was sort of a master of illusion… Having access to this invisible material with Pennebaker and Hegedus showed something new about DeLorean the man.

Waddell himself brought valuable perspective to the table, with a childhood spent around Belfast during the height of the DeLorean years, making him particularly sensitive to the complicated legacy left behind. “My dad worked at ITV in Northern Ireland, and they invited DeLorean over to launch the car in 1981,” he recalls. “He took me as a kid, and that’s when I first met John DeLorean, 40 years ago. It has remained a topic of interest ever since, being an important part of the early 80s industry in Northern Ireland… I was only 10 years old at the time, but I don’t remember the car and of its cultural significance than of everything that went on behind the scenes. But my father has remained very interested in the project over the years. When he became a freelance filmmaker, he tried several times to make a DeLorean film, and I became more and more aware of the central subject – the roller coaster of the dynamic between DeLorean and the UK government – as it went on. as I climbed. during my teens and early twenties.

The businessman cultivated a reputation as a prodigy, becoming the youngest member of General Motors’ C-suite in the company’s history before throwing everything in to go it alone. Its daring and daring concern would be to design, manufacture and distribute the next step in the evolution of the automobile, an elegant aerodynamic vehicle immediately distinguished by “gull wing” doors that would open instead of opening. Realizing that this fantasy would naturally require money, DeLorean toured the world in search of a government willing to back him up as a way to jumpstart the economy, and found that UK economy ministers were keen to reduce unemployment in Northern Ireland in the hopes that sectarian violence will fall with it. They paid around $ 120 million out of a total of $ 200 million in start-up costs, which the CEO is said to be skimming himself. All the while, the fiery demonstrations continued, throwing a destructive key into DeLorean’s work.

“DeLorean has always been celebrated as a hero here in Northern Ireland for what he brought to the country at a time when workers in West Belfast needed a promise of hope,” said Waddell. “This moment was all pessimistic and the DeLorean factory gave a picture of the future to the working class of the country. At the same time, he knew exactly what was going on, siphoning off money from his early days of working with the British government. He would use all the tricks of the trade to pull the wool out of their eyes.

Technical pitfalls gave way to delays on the assembly line, and it didn’t take long for the DMC to be heavily in debt. Needing $ 17 million to keep the lights on, DeLorean was exceptionally vulnerable when his former neighbor Jim Hoffman called him with an offer that could solve all of his problems: meet a few guys at Los Angeles International Airport, get few product, earn money. On grainy video tape, we watch DeLorean shake hands with the men who then slap him in handcuffs. In an operation, the criminal would fight tooth and nail in court. Waddell shares DeLorean’s claim that the government came after him for the simple reason that they knew his wallet was hurting. “When we did the trapping analysis, I saw that he was completely trapped,” he says. “He would have done anything to save his business. He had even made a deal with financiers that might have saved him if he hadn’t taken the cocaine route. It was his ego, his need for control that drove him into the FBI sting.

Pride comes to the fore as his defining quality, the drunken belief in confidence that he was untouchable – to Irish suicide bombers, creditors and the law. “From his time in Detroit, he always considered the focal point of his life story to be John DeLorean, not General Motors,” says Waddell. “He wanted to be in the center. He liked to take all the credit, especially with the Belfast factory. He fired any staff who refused to follow that line of his plans. Why do you think he gave the car its name? He had a huge ego. His ex-wife described him as a “clever narcissist”.

This limitless chasm of money hunger and pure self-interest captures the relevance that this pocket of history still carries for a present dazed by the mad ambition of the industry titan. Waddell traces a lineage from DeLorean to the “Richard Bransons of the World,” particularly the self-proclaimed space cowboys Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. They are all “driven by a dream,” he says, “but how far and at what cost? In the 1980s, DeLorean’s arrogance cost him everything. For today’s billionaires, that’s a cautionary tale. For archivists in Belfast, this is a contradictory study. To everyone else, he’s a schadenfreude-generating illustration of what happens when a person tries to grab too much and gets their hand stuck in the jar.